Zero Waste Activism: Opening the Doors of the Bigger Picture of Sustainability
Gittemarie Johannson is a Danish zero waste activist. She just published her first book, Sustainable Badass. She talked to us about how she started her zero-waste lifestyle, and what has changed in her life thanks to it.
Gittemarie Johannson is a Danish zero waste activist. She does green activism both online and offline, with lectures and workshops. She created a platform where people can share ideas about sustainability and how we can involve ourselves, not only as consumers but also in trying to learn and understand the bigger structures of society and industries that are also polluting.
She also just published a book, Sustainable badass, which she’s currently working on getting published in English as well (so far it’s in Danish).
The spark that zero waste started
It all started with a one month experiment. Back in 2015, still in uni and already blogging about beauty and fashion, Gittemarie decided to try out a zero waste month.
“At this point, basically no one in Denmark was talking about zero waste. Yet people seemed really interested in how my experiment was going. I learned that you need a little bit more time than just a month to be zero waste” she laughs, remembering. “That’s how my interest in sustainability took off. What started out as a fun experiment sparked something in me”.
Sustainability became this vessel with which she started to reflect on many other aspects of her life. She gave her first lecture in 2015 and found out that she really enjoyed talking about sustainability to people.
She loved having this sort of “pragmatic approach to sustainability, which, in 2015, was really missing from the discourse of sustainability, because everything was about committees and quotas and governments, and it was very rare that the consumer was spoken directly to” she reflects. Luckily, this has evolved since then.
It was only years later that Gittemarie really started to think about the “career”. “I really started to gain momentum, spending more time on developing platforms than on my university work”. While she was writing her master thesis, she was spending every available moment trying to establish a platform that would be financially sustainable once she finished. She never looked back.
“It has never been a “job-job” in the way that I dreaded working. I’ve loved working and I still see it as more of a passion than as a job”.
The daily tasks of a zero-waste activist
Gittemarie works a lot. She laughs at herself, saying she’s starting each day by doing something everyone is saying you shouldn’t do: checking her social media.
Then it’s a farmer’s market in the morning, and pictures from home, every day. “A lot of my content is focused on my everyday life”.
Early in the afternoon, she’s filming whatever she has scripted. The scripting part is done during the nights, after dinner.
“I think I work sometimes 10 hours a day. But I love working, and I can do a lot of it while I eat or watch movies” she points out. “When you love your work and it’s also something that you are passionate about, you end up doing it quite a lot”.
One of the things she says you have to get used to as an independent business owner is an unstable paycheck. “Things vary a lot from month to month, depending on how much work you’ve done, how many partners you have, how many sponsors deals were offered and accepted”. And for Gittemarie, that’s very few compared to what she is offered.
“I can not accept something that is risking my own integrity and values, which in sustainability can be very difficult” she underlines.
The steps towards a zero-waste lifestyle: like running a marathon
In terms of the zero-waste lifestyle in itself, Gittemarie talks about the small stuff. “It’s about what are my options for plastic-free grocery shopping. Stuff like how did I make my own makeup, or where did I find soaps, shampoos, conditioners without plastic. It’s recipes that I use in my daily life, how I cook with zero waste, how I compost”.
It’s about reimagining a daily routine, rethinking those gestures in a sustainable way.
“I compare zero waste with running a marathon. If you exercise every day, and you do the little things, then at one point you’ll feel ready to run your marathon. But if you’ve never worked out before and you start Monday morning by trying to run your marathon, it’s not going to work” Gittemarie smiles encouragingly.
She points out that a lot of the work actually happens inside your mind. In the end, the things that you actually do are a very small part of changing your lifestyle.
“It’s about rethinking your priorities. Thinking about what prestige is, what quality means to you, what is important, what are your values. And once you start rethinking those, the small zero-waste steps are going to come much easier”.
Zero Waste as the gate to a broader understanding
For her, zero waste was the gate to a bigger understanding of how consumers work.
“One of the things that with zero-waste developed within me is how I look at products, brands and labels, and how I perceive certain prestigious things. I was very into designer labels, when I was younger, I idealized it” she remembers.
“I now perceive designer labels in a very different light because of zero waste. It forces me to look at clothing production and how we use sweatshops for most of our clothes, and that also includes designer labels. When you know that your designer handbag is produced in the same sweatshop as the cheapest handbag, it doesn’t feel that great. Because you know that all the money that you pay doesn’t go towards having a quality product. You pay for a very expensive marketing campaign. Mostly you pay to make rich people richer” she points out.
Her career as a zero waste activist has also expanded her horizons. She feels incredibly grateful to be able to talk with people from all around the world about the issues close to her heart. “I can hear their experiences, their reactions to my content”, and that has been enlightening.
“When you make something and you think that it is universally helpful advice, and you hear people react to it, from all around the world, you understand suddenly that what you think of as universal isn’t necessarily so” she explains humbly.
Parting advice on your way to zero waste
Gittemarie is very encouraging and chilled regarding the path forward. She learned the hard way.
“In the beginning, I was freaked out every time I got a piece of plastic in my house that I had no control over. People brought something and left it there. I would be almost nauseous, so annoyed, it took up so much of my energy” she remembers vividly.
She chilled out. She avoids plastic just as she used to, but her mindset has changed quite a lot. “Perfection is not the goal. It would require you to have control over every situation in your life and that’s not realistic” she outlines.
As a first step, she recommends looking at our trash. “One of the things that I find peculiar about trash, in general, is that the second it leaves your hand to the bin, the ownership expires. And that is one of the issues with waste today, and why there is so much trash everywhere, why no one picks it up” she explains.
Therefore, her advice before going into the zero waste hacks is this: “take a normal day, doing normal things, and at the end of it, look at your bin. Map it all out, and think about your goals, what you want to reduce, what you could minimize to nothing. It will make it easier and a lot more comprehensible when you see it physically in front of you”.
As a final warning, and as a way to make the first step easier, Gittemarie also said “There’s no such thing as complete zero waste, it’s a goal rather than a practice. It’s impossible to be zero waste in a society not designed for it”.
Packaging and plastic only account for a small part of a product's impact. She advocates for a wide broad picture of sustainability rather than focusing on the small things. “When you go on a plane, you don’t make the plane travel zero waste by avoiding the bag of peanuts in plastic” she smiles.
